Posted on 12/15/2019 3:03:48 PM PST by robowombat
'We Are Never Going to Get the U.S. Military Out of Afghanistan'
BY ROBERT SPENCER
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said it: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”
That explains why we haven’t been able to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan after all these years: there is nothing going on there that will provide any stability, and there will not be, so apparently the State Department establishment wants us to stay there until the end of time.
In reality, the new revelations in the Washington Post make it clearer than ever that it is long past time to end the fool’s errand in Afghanistan. Michael Brendan Dougherty sums it up in National Review: “The more troubling revelation in the Post’s story was that multiple presidents and generals had lied elaborately to the public about the war, pretending it was going well even though they’d privately concluded that our objectives were contradictory and our strategy was a mess. Worse yet was the lying they did to themselves, creating endless color-coded metrics and then manipulating the data that was measured by them.”
An Army colonel who served as a senior adviser on Afghanistan during the Obama administration explained: “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Although the Post’s revelations are being treated as if they were explosive, they’re really nothing new. It has been obvious for a considerable period that no one knows what to do about Afghanistan, even as authorities put the best possible face on the proceedings. The former chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, was asked a year ago what the U.S. should do in Afghanistan now. McChrystal responded:
I don’t know. I wish I did … If we pull out and people like al-Qaeda go back, it’s unacceptable for any political administration in the [United States]. It would just be disastrous, and it would be a pain for us. If we put more troops in there and we fight forever, that’s not a good outcome either. I’m not sure what [is] the right answer. My best suggestion is to keep a limited number of forces there and just kind of muddle along and see what we can do. McChrystal was not alone. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, said much the same thing at that time:
Were we not to put the pressure on Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other groups in the region we are putting on today, it is our assessment that, in a period of time their capability would reconstitute, and they have today the intent, and in the future, they would have the capability to do what we saw on 9/11. Dunford added: “If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to continue to support the Afghans and continue to put pressure on those terrorist groups in the region, I am certainly open to a dialogue on that.”
Right. But the fact is that al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the Islamic State are in Afghanistan, and just biding their time until we leave. Are we going to stay there until the end of time? What we should do is pull out and adopt a strategy modeled after the old containment strategy that was used in the Cold War. I’ve harshly criticized the foreign policy establishment for retaining old Cold War paradigms and failing to adapt to the new realities of the world, particularly the resurgent jihad, but in this case, the wonks would do well to revisit some Cold War history.
What would be contained today would be jihadis: we would focus our efforts on preventing them from ever leaving Afghanistan and sowing mayhem anywhere else, while giving up our quixotic aspirations of Wilsonian nation-building. Accompany that with a robust and unapologetic affirmation of American values (freedom of speech, equality of rights of women, etc.) instead of the support we have given to Sharia in Afghanistan (and previously in Iraq), and an honest acknowledgment of the motivating ideology behind jihad activity, and we might actually start getting somewhere.
But none of this is likely to be done. And meanwhile “green-on-blue” attacks, in which a member of the American military is murdered by someone who was supposed to be on his side, continue to occur with dreary regularity. One of the elements of the establishment media’s rap sheet on me, which supposedly establishes that I’m a bigoted “Islamophobe,” is that I’ve said that there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadis from peaceful Muslims, because peaceful Muslims have not made any particular effort to separate jihadis from their communities. Yet these ongoing insider attacks in Afghanistan prove me correct. These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.
The fool’s errand in Afghanistan has no goal, no endpoint, no definition of victory. It should have been ended years ago, and should be ended now. What are we fighting for at this point, anyway? The Taliban are never going to surrender. American forces have supervised the implementation of an Afghan constitution that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land. Yet Islamic law is nothing like the democratic principles that we went into Afghanistan to defend (over here) and establish (over there). Sharia institutionalizes the oppression of women and non-Muslims, extinguishes freedom of speech, and denies the freedom of conscience.
Was that what we were fighting for?
Nonetheless, America continued to pour out her blood and treasure for this repressive state, with no clear objective or mission in view other than a never-defined “victory.” No one has defined what victory would look like in Afghanistan. What could it possibly look like? Has the Ghani regime ever allowed women to throw off their burqas and take their place in Afghan society as human beings equal in dignity to men? Does the Ghani government, or any Afghan government that would follow it, ever intend to guarantee basic human rights to the tiny and ever-dwindling number of non-Muslims unfortunate enough to live within its borders? Of course not.
And no matter how long American troops stay in Afghanistan, no Afghan regime is ever going to do such things. But nonetheless, we remain there. Muddling along is the order of the day.
The Washington Times is reporting that President Trump is
allegedly going to pull 4000 troops out out the 12-13,000
stationed in Afghanistan.
But there is something that can create stability over there without is. It’s called “Russia”. Let them waste their time and money, and not us. The uncivilized apes in that region will never be pacified. They don’t want to be. They like it being a s***hole. Not our circus, and not our monkeys.
The Washington Times is reporting that President Trump is
allegedly going to pull 4000 troops out out the 12-13,000
stationed in Afghanistan.
_________________________________________________
That still leaves 8000-9000 too many.
Comparison between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union is absurd. Soviet Union leaders had some semblance of sanity. If we leave then maybe not tomorrow or even next year or five years from now but sooner or later the bad guys will gain power and Afghanistan will be another Iran problem worrying about them producing nuclea Warheads
At least we are there to put out any fires before they get too big.
They also likely stop Terror plots before they get too far along.
I think we underestimate how much we are doing over there.
As bad as the worst neighborhoods here are, it would be much worse without police functioning there. Not a great comparison but the best I can think of.
Comparison between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union is absurd. Soviet Union leaders had some semblance of sanity. If we leave then maybe not tomorrow or even next year or five years from now but sooner or later the bad guys will gain power and Afghanistan will be another Iran problem worrying about them producing nuclea Warheads
At least we are there to put out any fires before they get too big.
They also likely stop Terror plots before they get too far along.
I think we underestimate how much we are doing over there.
As bad as the worst neighborhoods here are, it would be much worse without police functioning there. Not a great comparison but the best I can think of.
The problem with the war in Afghanistan,Korea and Vietnam was the confusion over the mission. War is for decimating your enemy and leaving them incapable of waging war for the foreseeable future. Nation building, spreading democracy or passing out the rice and beans can never and will never lead to victory.
Good point. We should have listened to MacArthur. BTW...Iraq is considered Asia too
Nuts. We should have let USSR stay there forever.
“... England tried it way back in 1860’s and Russia now us.” [SkyDancer, post 2]
“There hasn’t been a single army since and including the army of Alexander the Great, that has been successful in Afghanistan...” [BuffaloJack, post 7]
The conceit that Afghanistan can neither be taken nor held is not as well-supported by the historical record as many think.
The British were not beaten. They went in to counter the Imperial Russians, who had given indications they might attack India by that route. When Russian attention turned elsewhere, the British walked away.
The USSR was on the verge of complete success when American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles were sent in. The Soviet effort collapsed because their air power was negated.
Americans have enjoyed successes there to a degree as great as any other power, at least as early.
We must remember that in Afghanistan, we are up against cultures possessing a very different concept of what constitutes short-term and when that transitions to long-term.
To us Americans, long term begins before the next election cycle, or even the next sports season.
To the Afghans, short term isn’t even reached after the passage of 50 to 100 years.
Until American citizens can reconcile this disparity, our actions in the wider world will face difficulties.
It didn’t have to be this way.
46 Fascinating Photos Of 1960s Afghanistan Before The Taliban
https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan
[What would be contained today would be jihadis: we would focus our efforts on preventing them from ever leaving Afghanistan and sowing mayhem anywhere else, while giving up our quixotic aspirations of Wilsonian nation-building. Accompany that with a robust and unapologetic affirmation of American values (freedom of speech, equality of rights of women, etc.) instead of the support we have given to Sharia in Afghanistan (and previously in Iraq), and an honest acknowledgment of the motivating ideology behind jihad activity, and we might actually start getting somewhere. ]
A British incursion into Afghanistan ended in disaster in 1842 when an entire British army, while retreating back to India, was massacred. Only a single survivor made it back to British-held territory. It was assumed the Afghans let him live to tell the story of what had happened.
On January 6, 1842, the British began their withdrawal from Kabul. About 4,500 British troops and 12,000 civilians who had followed the British Army to Kabul left the city. The plan was to march to Jalalabad, about 90 miles away.
The Brits left Afghanistan right after that.
“Massacre of British Army in Afghanistan in 1842...Only a single survivor made it back...The Brits left Afghanistan right after that.” [SkyDancer, post 29]
Your information is incomplete. Also superficial.
Why?
Imperial British moves were not concluded after 1842. They went back in a number of years later. 1897, if memory serves: Winston Churchill tagged along, on extended leave from his cavalry regiment.
Your tone bears hints of intellectual dishonesty, implying that the British gave up because they suffered heavy losses. That’s more of American gambit, to judge by our cowardly withdrawal from Southeast Asia in the 1970s.
Superficial for a superficial post.
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